Consultancy - Implementing behavioural finance

Your performance is around six times more dependent on the strength of the processual framework around your decision-making than it is on the quality or volume of your data and analysis. When you think about that you start to do things differently. We have - and we do.

I don't consult often and will in most cases direct you to the very competent teams at www.behaviouralstrategy.com or include them to do some of the heavy lifting.

The things we've helped people with in the past:

A comprehensive and actionable review of your organisations current capabilities to convert data and analysis into good decisions via our proprietary Decision Scorecard model.

Practical and sensible consultancy work that improves your organisations structural capability to both make good decisions and - even more importantly - avoid bad ones. I call this Decision Process Strengthening.

Facilitation of a critical here-and-now decision process that can't wait for organisational buildup - I call this a 'Red Team' process or programme.

Training of both teams and individuals in order to avoid decision biases and create decision-friendly frameworks and workflows. Rationality is, to a meaningful extend, trainable.

Participation in one of our Consultation-by-Joint-Research projects where we define and field test a question that - if answered - would allow you to improve an element of your performance in a meaningful way.

A succesful consultation is defined by working to change your organisation permanently for the better. Sometimes this is immediately measurable in terms of workflows or optimisations of cost structures or income streams.

At other times the results we deliver are simply lower risk in the form of a higher degree of warranted certainty in your investment decisions.

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Our Approach Is Key:

"Take a simple idea. Then take it seriously" - Charles Munger, vicepresident of Berkshire Hathaway.

My simple idea for both the writings on this site as well as the consultancy work that I do was that people are not always rational - despite both their best efforts and their conviction to the contrary. And the insight that this ought to matter to asset managers and investors of all kinds and that ensuring a rigorous and rational process is the primary driver of investment results is what lies at the foundation of The Investing Process.

The question, of course, is "How?". Behavioural Finance and modern Decision Theory have placed themselves in the borderland between a set of diverse fields such as economics, psychology, finance theory, anthropology, statistical mathematics and the philosophical theory of knowledge in order to try and answer this. It is from this place that I work when consulting.

As such I apply traditional consulting skills along with a research approach from behavioural economics to the decision processes that run in your organisation. We evaluate each step in your organisations data creation process from a human cognition viewpoint. We look at how your standard memos frame decisions. We identify recurring critical decision situations and evaluate them according to the learnings of behavioural finance and decision theory.

I work with you to change critical steps in both your ressource generation, your process execution and in setting priorities in order to improve the quality of your decision capabilities.

I turn down most projects as I only have time to do 1-3 engagements a year, given my other responsibilities, but when accepted I take complete ownership of the project and invest my best thinking, network of other specialists and commitment to its success.